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7 - Circulation of Books and Reform Ideas between Female Monasteries in Medieval Castile: From Twelfth-Century Cistercians to the Observant Reform
- Edited by Julie Hotchin, Australian National University, Canberra, Jirki Thibaut
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- Book:
- Women and Monastic Reform in the Medieval West, c.100-1500
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 09 January 2024
- Print publication:
- 04 April 2023, pp 154-179
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Summary
Processes of Reform in Female Monasteries in Medieval Castile: A World of Diversitas
The revision of the traditional rhetoric of religious reform by recent scholarship has acknowledged the lack of a clear definition. Indeed, there were many reform movements, all of them distinct from one another and closely related through the contingencies of time and space. Thus, we must analyse the peculiarities of each of these reforms, avoiding preconceived ideas about the uniformity of these movements which have shaped modern scholarship's vision of reform. As Steven Vanderputten has argued, reforms of individual institutions have to be analysed and understood as processes, rather than as ‘flashpoint events’. Hence, they should not be seen as a result of the agency of a charismatic reformer, nor as the simple implementation of a reformist programme. On the contrary, reform was normally a long-term process, with different phases, and in which the tension between structure and agency, and between the institution's past and present, were a constant. It was a negotiated, collective endeavour, which evolved through time, in response to changing circumstances. Claire Taylor Jones has reached similar conclusions in analysing the specific case of the Observant reform of the German Dominican Order, and in particular of Dominican nuns. She proved how the traditional narrative presenting the Golden Age at the order's founding in the thirteenth century, the decline in the fourteenth century and renewal by Dominican ‘Observants’ was a preconceived scheme that does not reflect reality.
Every reform movement can only properly be understood in a broader and comparative framework. At present this comparative approach is hampered by the imbalance in the state of research into different territories, religious orders and timeframes. Whereas a high number of studies have focused on Central and Northern Europe, as well as on Italian convents, research into reform processes for the Iberian Peninsula, and particularly in Castile, has remained fairly underdeveloped. 8 Moreover, in Castile, traditional historiography has approached these questions from the perspective of the ‘official’ reformers, offering a vision of false homogeneity. For instance, regarding the Observant reform, the majority of studies have focused on the late period coinciding with the reign of the Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella (r. 1475–1516). Nevertheless, although their role cannot be denied, the monarchs were not the only agents of reform and, as we will see later, they acted only in the later phase of a long-term reform process.
12 - Between Collective Memory and Individual Remembrance in Women’s Religious Communities
- Edited by Kimm Curran, Janet Burton, University of Wales Trinity Saint David, Lampeter
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- Book:
- Medieval Women Religious, c.800-c.1500
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 08 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 24 January 2023, pp 202-220
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Summary
Women, especially women religious, created individual, collective, and histor-ical memory and, over the last two decades, their roles have gained increas-ing scholarly attention. There has been a flourishing of studies analysing women and the organisation of funerary memory, women commissioners and producers of chronicles, liturgical and devotional books, and other narrative sources, arte-facts of material culture from memorial stones to sacred vessels, and architecture. These studies demonstrate how women created, reinvented, or even erased the past by consciously selecting some elements and concealing others, and also how men and women collaborated in the memorial tradition of the Middle Ages. Women who acted as patrons self-consciously manipulated liturgy, artworks, buildings, and spaces to shape their own, or their families’, remembrance, and their dynastic iden-tity. In the case of religious women, commemoration of their kin converged with the memory of their communities. Both of them were types of a collective and identity-oriented memorialisation developed since the Early Middle Ages, which coexisted with a later form of commemoration, a more individual one that entailed intercession, in the form of prayers, and donations, to shorten the time of the deceased in Purgatory. These have to be studied together as women had an active role in the making ‘multifaceted memory’ that in some cases commemorated at the same time, a dynasty, a religious community, and an individual.
The role of women as memory keepers of their families, through the foundation of monasteries, donations, and the institution of anniversaries for the deceased, has been explored in different territories, although further comparative analysis between diverse monastic landscapes by adopting a gender perspective is still nec-essary. Many ‘elite’ women's monastic communities worked as bastions of dynastic familial memory since the Early Middle Ages, and by the Central Middle Ages these foundations suffered significant changes as they passed from being ‘family monas-teries’, closely ruled by members of the aristocracy, to being incorporated into the reforms based on the Rule of St Benedict and especially into the Cistercian Order. However, their role as funerary memorials for the aristocracy or the royalty contin-ued, and women collaborated with the new reformed orders in the commemoration of their lineage, as they would do later with the mendicants.